Carmel-by-the-Sea, California: Permit Required

Carmel-by-the-Sea issues free permits to wear high heels — a 1963 rule born of tree roots, unpaved lanes, and a village built by poets.

Three stories posted across one week in late summer 2026 — the bohemians who fled a broken San Francisco for a beach with no streets, the 1929 ordinance that made the village outrank its own businesses, and the town that went 110 years without street addresses. Each part below is the full post as published, with the reel it accompanied.

New here? Start with the full Carmel history, or browse the Carmel collection.

Part I — Ten Dollars Down  ·  Part II — Permit Required  ·  Part III — The 13th House on the Right

---

Part I — Mon Aug 31, 2026 · Ten Dollars Down

What do you do when your city falls down? If you were a San Francisco poet in 1906, you followed the King of Bohemia to a beach with no streets.

Carmel-by-the-Sea began as a 1902 real-estate gamble aimed at artists — ten dollars down — and the 1906 earthquake delivered the artists.

Carmel-by-the-Sea started as a real-estate gamble. In 1902 James Devendorf and Frank Powers’ Carmel Development Company carved the pines above Carmel Bay into lots and aimed its brochures at an unusual market: professors, painters, writers — "bohemian types." Ten dollars down. Little or no interest. Pay what you can each month. Nobody else was selling land that way, because nobody else wanted the customers. (The park in the middle of the village still carries Devendorf’s name.)

The first big fish arrived in 1905. George Sterling was the poet San Francisco called the "uncrowned King of Bohemia," and his aunt bought him a house in the Carmel pines. He wrote to his mentor Ambrose Bierce that he intended to raise vegetables, raid the mussel reefs and cultivate a taste for rice. A Walden with better weather.

Then, at 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground shook for the better part of a minute, and San Francisco stopped existing as anyone had known it. Two hundred thousand people were homeless. The bohemian cafes were rubble. And the answer, for a remarkable number of writers and painters, was simple: follow Sterling. By June his diary records a beach barbecue for forty guests, a keg, martinis, enchiladas and sausages. "A great day."

They kept coming. Mary Austin, who wrote in a treehouse. Jack London, in and out. The photographer Arnold Genthe. The MacGowan sisters. An Arts and Crafts Club formed in 1905 to give them all something to argue about. By 1910 the San Francisco Call reported that sixty percent of the houses in Carmel had been built by people devoting their lives to the aesthetic arts. In 1910 Herbert Heron carved an outdoor stage out of the woods and called it the Forest Theater. He would later be mayor. So would Perry Newberry, another writer and actor. The town’s early councils were dominated by artists.

When Carmel finally incorporated as a city, on October 31, 1916, it was a village of poets who had chosen unpaved streets, tents and rough cottages over everything a real city offered. Nobody had written that choice down yet.

They were about to. In ink. With permits. The paperwork begins in Part II.

Watch “Ten Dollars Down” on InstagramWatch “Ten Dollars Down” on Facebook

---

Part II — Wed Sep 2, 2026 · Permit Required

It is illegal to wear high heels in Carmel-by-the-Sea. It has been since 1963, and City Hall will happily give you a permit.

Ordinance No. 87 of 1963 requires a free permit for heels over two inches — a liability shield for a village that chose tree roots over pavement.

The poets got organized. In 1929 the city’s attorney, Argyll Campbell, drafted Ordinance No. 96, and Carmel adopted it as something close to a constitution. The village was declared "primarily, essentially and predominantly a residential city," where business and commerce "have in the past, are now, and are proposed to be in the future subordinated to its residential character." Locals call it Carmel’s Magna Carta. It is still the law, and it hangs on the wall behind the council’s seats.

Everything else follows from that one sentence.

The trees came first. Carmel calls itself a city within a forest, and it means it: the Monterey pines and cypresses are planted irregularly on purpose, so the streets read as woods instead of a grid. The city keeps a forester and manages more than 13,000 public trees. Want to remove a tree on your own lot? You need a permit from the Director of Forest, Parks and Beach. Want to cut a limb four inches thick? Permit.

Then the consequences. Trees mean roots, and roots mean the pavement buckles. So the village decided the pavement would stay informal: no sidewalks outside the small downtown, no parking meters, and no streetlights. Bring a flashlight.

Which brings us to the shoes. In 1963 the city attorney looked at the root-heaved brick and dirt paths and saw a lawsuit. His fix was Ordinance No. 87, now Chapter 8.44 of the municipal code: heels over two inches high with less than one square inch of bearing surface are prohibited on the public streets and sidewalks — without a permit. The ordinance explains itself with a straight face. The city’s "urban forest character" requires "some informality in the lighting, location and surfacing of street and sidewalk areas," which poses "greater risk to those wearing high heeled shoes more adaptable to formal city life."

The permit is free. You sign it at City Hall, and in signing you release the city from liability if you fall. The police have never cited anyone. Visitors collect the certificate as a souvenir, signed by the clerk on duty. Asked recently whether the council had thought about repealing it, the city clerk said it had never come up.

Carmel did not ban heels. It decided the trees mattered more than your ankles — and filed the paperwork. What the paperwork never covered: Part III.

See “Permit Required” on InstagramWatch “Permit Required” on Facebook

---

Part III — Sat Sep 5, 2026 · The 13th House on the Right

For 110 years, exactly one building in Carmel-by-the-Sea had a street address. The post office.

Carmel homes carried names and compass directions instead of numbers until October 2025, when the council voted 5–0 to adopt street addresses.

Everyone else lived by description. The municipal code itself required homes to be identified by their position from the nearest cross street, so a Carmel address read like a treasure map: "Carmelo, 6 NE of 4th." One council member’s directions to guests ended with "we’re the 13th house on the right." Others gave the color of the door, the shape of the roof, the cypress on the corner. Cottages carried names instead — Hansel, Sea Urchin — and local folklore held that renaming one brought bad luck.

Mail never came to the house. The founders rejected door-to-door delivery as too "citified," so every resident got a free box at the post office: more than 4,000 boxes in a town of about 3,000 people. The daily walk to collect the mail became the village’s town square, the place you ran into everyone.

It also became the argument that never ended. Residents have fought over house numbers since at least 1925. When California proposed requiring every municipality to assign addresses in 1953, Carmel was so incensed it threatened to secede from the state.

The modern world kept knocking. Online shopping exploded, and delivery drivers circled the pines looking for "the second house from the corner." Banks, utilities and Medicare forms rejected P.O. boxes. One resident told the council about waiting in the street for a medical delivery because the driver could not find the apartment. Another warned that numbers would ruin a haven for artists, writers and poets where "the police know where everyone is."

The town is not what it was in 1906. The median age is 68.5, nearly double California’s. In 2024 the council voted 3–2 to start the process. In October 2025 it voted 5–0 to adopt a standard street-address system, and this spring the first street numbers in the city’s history began going onto homes, shops and public buildings.

Here is what did not change. The Postal Service will not begin home delivery, so the walk to the post office continues. The house names stay on the gateposts. And the ordinance that started all this in 1929 still hangs behind the council.

Carmel finally has addresses. It just prefers you didn’t use them.

Watch “The 13th House” on InstagramWatch “The 13th House” on Facebook

Wear the History

Retro Carmel apparel, hats and home goods.

---

Read the full history behind the design, or browse all cities and towns.

Carmel-by-the-Sea · California History · Village Life · Monterey Peninsula · Bohemians · Small Towns